An art installation showing high heels on Islamic prayer rugs was pulled from an exhibition near Paris after a Muslim group complained the work could provoke "uncontrollable" reactions, the artist said Tuesday. 

"Silence", which has already been shown in Paris, Berlin, New York and Madrid, was supposed to go on display in Clichy La Garenne, which is just north of the capital, in a woman-themed art show.

Written on cigarette packs or scraps of newspaper, embroidered with a fishbone on shreds of cloth or scratched on birch bark, clandestine letters from the Soviet Gulag were composed by any means prisoners had.

Now those desperate calls from people banished to the oblivion of Soviet-era labour camps are being given full voice in a Moscow exhibition showcasing letters from the Gulag.

Pope Francis has met a Spanish transsexual and his fiancée at the Vatican, opening his doors to a man dubbed "the devil's daughter" by a local priest, media reports said Tuesday.

Diego Neria Lejarraga met the pontiff on Saturday after writing to him in December to complain he was being treated as an outcast in his parish in Plasencia in western Spain, according to the Spanish daily Hoy.

Britain is to build a new Holocaust memorial in central London to which the government will contribute £50 million (67 million euros, $75 million), ministers said Tuesday. 

The memorial will be built along with an education center in a bid to ensure that the lessons of World War II's mass killing of Jews by the Nazis are never forgotten.

President Vladimir Putin on Tuesday slammed what he called attempts to rewrite history and lauded the Red Army at a ceremony marking the 70th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz.

Putin is conspicuously staying away from the main events in Poland, his absence highlighting ever-deepening divisions with the West over the war in Ukraine.

Turkey will host a ceremony to commemorate Holocaust victims in its capital for the first time in a sign of solidarity with the Jewish community, an official said. 

"The ceremony will take place in Ankara for the first time, with the presence of parliament speaker," the official told Agence France Presse.

A new report says that poverty is on the rise in Venezuela and efforts across Latin America to boost incomes are stalling.

The report by the United Nations' regional economic office in Chile says that in Venezuela poverty rose from 25 percent in 2012, to 32 percent in 2013.

Researchers looking for the remains of Spanish writer Miguel de Cervantes said Monday they found part of a casket at a Madrid convent bearing the initials of the "Don Quixote" author.

The team made the find over the weekend inside an alcove in the crypt at the Convent of the Barefoot Trinitarians during excavations aimed at solving the mystery of the writer's final resting place. 

Saudi Arabia on Monday postponed its biggest national cultural festival, an event developed by the late King Abdullah, after his death last week.

The Janadriyah festival was to be held on February 4-22, with a special guest pavilion from Germany.

The Church of England ended centuries of male-only leadership on Monday as Libby Lane became its first female bishop at a grand ceremony in York cathedral, despite fierce opposition from traditionalists.

Dozens of clergymen crowded around to lay their hands on the 48-year-old's head and pronounced the prayer making her a new bishop in front of 2,000 people.